Urban collapse, the next terrorism threat

Page Tools

Forget water - the world's cities are at greater risk from lack of
security, writes Joel Kotkin.

You have to hand it to Londoners. They refused to be cowed by
the July 7 terrorist attacks. And when new explosions last week
threatened to paralyse the city again, they carried on with a
characteristic British stiff upper lip. But admirable as their
resilience has been, it shouldn't blind us to the reality that the
great challenge facing the world's big cities today is finding a
way to make life safe for their citizens.

Though the fashion is to blame energy, food and water shortages
for urban decline, far more cities have fallen due to a breakdown
in security. Whether the menace is internal disorder or external
threat, history shows that once a city can no longer protect its
inhabitants, they inevitably flee, and it slides into decline and
even extinction.

While modern cities are a long way from extinction, it's only by
acknowledging the primacy of security - and addressing it
aggressively - that they will be able to survive and thrive. They
already face the challenge of a telecommunications revolution that
is undermining their monopoly on information and culture.

As businesses and industries escape cities to operate in small
towns and even the countryside, demographic surveys show the
population is going with them. After a brief, welcome surge in
inner-city populations in the late 1990s, most older American
cities have lost more people than they gained since 2000. Families,
retirees and immigrants, the key sources of population growth, are
largely deserting the urban core.

This flight is not just an American phenomenon: inner-city
populations have declined in London, Paris, Hamburg, Milan and
Frankfurt.

We don't yet know fully how the terrorist threat - "the fear
factor" - exacerbates urban depopulation. It is clear that American
inner-city residents reacted far more strongly to the attacks of
September 11, 2001, than people in suburbs and smaller towns.

More palpable are the decisions by financial services firms to
shift more of their operations from the big cities, in part because
they are less vulnerable to a terrorist assault.

It is too early to tell how businesses or individuals might
react if terrorist attacks were to become common. But history shows
that many of the earliest cities of antiquity shrank and ultimately
disappeared after being overrun by more violent peoples. As is the
case today, the greatest damage was often inflicted not by
organised states, but by nomadic peoples or even small bands of
brigands who either detested urban civilisation or had little use
for its arts.

The first great cities of the Americas - those of the Olmecs and
the Maya in Central America and the pre-Inca civilisations in the
Andes - declined primarily due to invasion. Between the fourth and
sixth centuries, as many as 85,000 people lived in Teotihuacan in
central Mexico. With an invasion from the north in AD750, residents
fled and the site has remained largely deserted ever since. The
best-known example of security-driven collapse, of course, is
Rome.

Sadly, many metropolitan leaders seem less than prepared to meet
the terrorist threat head-on, in part due to the trendy
multiculturalism that now characterises so many Western cities.

If cities are to survive in Europe or elsewhere, they will have
to face up to the need for sometimes harsh measures, such as
tighter immigration laws, preventive detention and widespread
surveillance of suspected terrorists, to protect the urban
future.

Technological measures - from cameras in underground rail
tunnels to radiation-scanning devices at highway approaches to big
cities - can also help improve security, as can steps such as
putting more police and bomb-sniffing dogs on trains and buses, as
New York recently decided to do.

The kinds of policies needed to secure their safety may pose a
serious dilemma for cities that have been built upon the values of
openness, freedom of movement, privacy, tolerance and due process.
Yet to survive, these same cities may now need to shift their
primary focus to protecting their people, their commerce and their
future against those who seek to undermine and even, ultimately,
destroy them.

Joel Kotkin is an Irvine Senior Fellow with the New America
Foundation and the author of The City: A Global
History.